A reason to love chumby, part I

The sexypeople widget.

chumby on everything

In the past we have discussed that chumby is really a service, more than simply a product (though it’s a great product too: buy one!).  The whole point of chumby is to enable your own personalized, always-on, at-a-glance, multimedia internet on any connected screen-based device you choose.  Consider chumby the internet, appropriately delivered, for consumer electronics: photo frames, clock radios, even your TV.  We’re not just talking about this as a vision, we’re showing it…today.  So here’s a video clip that lets you in on the fun.

How to sleep and wake, chumby-style

First, assuming you have a chumby (if not, get one here), set it to use chumby’s “beta control panel” software — you look for this link on your “my chumby dashboard” page on the chumby web site:

(Some more detail about exactly what’s involved in the beta software is described here.  And soon this will all be part of the standard offering and you won’t have to be a guinea pig to do this.)

When you’re ready to turn-in, do the following:

1.) Create a “Neil Young” Pandora station on your chumby;

2.) Create a “Chopin” Pandora station on your chumby;

3.) Go to the “Alarms” area on your chumby, create a “Custom Alarm,” set the time you want to wake up and choose Pandora with your new “Chopin Station” as the Alarm music source ;

4.) Get out of the Alarms area on your chumby and go to the Music area;

5.) Select Pandora as the music source you want to listen to now and play your “Neil Young Station” on Pandora;

6.) When you go back to the Music area on chumby you’ll now see that there’s a timer above all of the music sources and it tells you that your Neil Young station is playing (assuming that it is) — you can choose to set this timer for how long you want Mr. Young, and other similar artists, to play before this channel turns off;

7.) Put your chumby in “Night Mode” where the screen gets dark (and, if you’d like, it can be turned completely dark), showing you a dim clock and how much time left before Neil turns off;

8.) Turn off your lights, lie back and drift off to sleep with Cinnamon Girl or some other classic and, when your alarm goes off, it will be to Chopin’s Etudes (or something “Chopin-like” in the Pandora way of thinking).  Just beautiful.

By the way, once set, you don’t have to do these steps every time — you’re good-to-go with your morning Chopin alarm — it will do this every morning, or just certain mornings, whatever you decide — you don’t have to reset it, it remembers.

chumby wasn’t specifically designed to be a clock radio (it does so much more!), but this is what enables it to be a great one.  Is there another clock radio that can do this?

Of course feel free to go to sleep to Chopin and wake to Neil, or replace them with any other artists, or any other music source for that matter.

this sure beats the buzz